Journal Day 34

This entry is for November 26th, but I’m writing it the morning of the next day, November 27th.

It was my mom’s birthday this morning, I think the first thing I did after waking up was greet her happy birthday. I then continued reading through the Rx for Computer Eyes book. I learned about the structure of the eye and how it functioned. The reason the majority of us are now starting to wear glasses despite hundreds of years ago it was a rare occurrence, is because the perfect focus of our eyes through our biology and evolution is 20 feet or more.

Through our continuous computer usage and other ‘near work’, our eyes have started refocusing from looking at objects 20 feet away to looking at objects around a foot away. This is similar to how if you focus a close object on a camera, everything behind appears blurry. So from our continuous near work, our eyes started refocusing closer and closer from 20 feet, to 19 feet, to 18 feet, etc, until it refocused to what we eye glass wearers have now. which is around 1 foot or less.

We can see things clearly if it’s about a foot or less away, more clearly than a person who can see 20 feet or further clearly. But for anyone that needs glasses, our issue is that we can’t see anything more than a foot away. Anything beyond that is a complete blur. It’s because our eyes, from constant near work, have “permanently” refocused to seeing 1 foot or less in front of us.

The book basically says: Okay you have bad vision now, the best thing you can do is maintain your current level of vision by taking breaks often to look 20 feet or further and by doing eye exercises. It suggests two ways to improve vision: LASIK eye surgery, or cornea reshaping contacts. I raised my middle finger at both suggestions.

if the problem was that our eyes refocused because of 8+ hours a day of near work, wouldn’t the solution be to look at objects 20 feet or further away for 8+ hours a day in order to refocus them to adjust to 20 feet or further out? I’ve looked online and 99.99% of people, including doctors and optometrists, say that vision improvement is impossible. What’s the point of eye exercises then? Eye exercises actually do improve vision for a short period of time, before we refocus on doing near work again.

I can see many problems to why there are so few cases of people improving their vision to go from wearing glasses to not wearing glasses (and there are cases):

You probably have glasses from doing 8+ hours a day of of near work. It is nearly impossible to just switch from that, to suddenly doing 8+ hours a day of 20+ feet or more work

You have to not wear glasses or contacts while training your eyes to look at 20 feet or more. Your glasses or contacts manually refocus your eyes a certain degree, and because while wearing glasses your brain says “Okay I can see clearly at this focus level” (which is the incorrect focus level), your eyes do not refocus to looking further out

It is pretty terrifying to walk around not being able to see anything. Imagine doing that for 8+ hours a day. Also, you constantly have to be looking at things 20 feet or further away, being in a home where walls are less than 20 feet away from you will not help. Being outdoors is basically mandatory.

It will take an impossibly long time. Our eyes became worse through years of incorrect re-focusing to near work. To re-focus them to a further distance would take an insatiably long time. Again, daily at 8+ hours a day, plus years of doing it.

Who will put in the time or effort for this? Who has the resources?

Because of these conditions, it’s easier to say it’s impossible to solve the vision problem than to actually address it. Even me, a person who has total autonomy (work doesn’t dictate my hours, school doesn’t dictate my hours, no one dictates my hours) where I can do anything I want at anytime I want, still finds training the eyes to be very difficult and hard to find the time for.

It is much much easier to say “it can’t be done” than to actually do it. Yesterday I put this hypothesis to the test and I walked outside twice without my glasses for around 1-2 hours each session. I found it extremely difficult. I would’ve lasted longer but my stamina wore out, each time I arrived home I went to sleep for an hour or more each.

I walked outside in the afternoon around 4 PM and I couldn’t see a thing. I had glasses in my pocket just in case. But it was very difficult. From a distance, I could still make out buildings and general shapes, I could see colors vividly. I’d describe the experience as ‘walking through a painting’ because that’s what it basically was.

I stood in front of a speed limit sign, the ones that say “SPEED LIMIT 45”, and I could not read it perfectly. I could read it, but it was blurry as hell. That’s standing in a distance where I could almost touch the sign with my stomach. Literally right in front of it.

This walk lasted for around an hour or two. It was very difficult as you can imagine, again, this is why it’s easier to say “vision improvement is impossible”. I didn’t give up though, after reading the book and understanding how our vision works and how lenses merely ‘re-adjusted the focus’ of our eyes, I knew the solution was just to re-focus them through training, just like how they were re-focused incorrectly in the first place through hours and hours and year upon year of incorrect re-focusing.

Anyway, because of this I’m going to spend less time with computers in general, but when I use them, it’s going to be for very productive purposes. I’m going to walk around outside more often without my glasses or contacts on to train my vision, and also to lose weight and improve my stamina. I only wish I was paid to do this, because I know I need more money. I might be able to listen to educational audiobooks during my walk or call people and have a chat with them.

Everything above was basically my conclusion and my ideas, they’re not found anywhere else on the Internet as of this writing. Because the ideas are really good and insightful though, I know others will use them in their articles or videos or whatever. I’m fine with that as long as I’m given proper credit. I might actually just publish an article like this called “Is vision improvement possible?”and just copy and paste the above, because it’s sort of written in an article format. Yeah, I’ll do that along with just writing my normal entry for the day.

I don’t really care about the credit, I just want people to read this content. Majority of the ideas in the world are common sense or recycled ideas anyway, my ideas above were just ideas applicable to other fields, applied to vision. There’s very little originality in most works. But if credit is given, then I get some linkage, then I get some readers, and that would be awesome.

So after I finished reading the Rx for Computer Eyes book, I formed all these ideas about how to improve vision, what changes I could make, etc. It was my mom’s birthday, so I went to church with her. We were supposed to go at around 8:30 AM, but we forgot about it, so we didn’t arrive until the mass was already over.

When we arrived at the church, I couldn’t help but admiring it. It took so much architectural work to design this building, plus the interior was beautiful. Light shown in everywhere, the windows had this tiled mosaic design, there was a huge Jesus on a cross hanging above the altar.

The Catholic religion has its own theme that belongs nowhere else that it almost seems surreal. It’s almost magical in the way you kneel down and touch the face and body at certain points when entering, sometimes using holy water. The rituals and environment is so detached and different from everything else in the world that it feels like you’re entering a different plane. If I were to make a building, it would have its own theme and rituals different from everything else in the world.

I entered with my mom and we found a place to sit. We moved the thing down that you kneeled on top of, and I kneeled down with her. She put her elbows on top of the seat in front, put her palms together, and prayed. I did the same, except I prayed only briefly. I spent most of the time looking at and just admiring the place and the people. It’s so awesome how all of this was made. I don’t have any rights to the images, but the place is called “Our Lady of Hope Catholic Church” if you want to see pictures.

After that, we went home, I think I trained my eyes more, and then we went out to lunch really early at around 10:30 AM. My dad had work at noon, so we had to leave quickly. We ate at a place we hadn’t eaten at before, and I didn’t like it. The place was expensive and they barely gave out any food. I was still hungry by the time we left. I will never go back there again.

Not really anything else happened. I walked outside in the afternoon for an hour or two and experienced what it was like walking through a painting, everything was blurred. 7ish PM, I replied to Obs’ email, telling her why I suddenly became concerned about my vision. Shortly after, I took my mom out to AppleBee’s for her birthday, we paid half the price for our food and got so much more than the restaurant we went to earlier, plus it tasted better. AppleBee’s is still my favorite bargain restaurant.

Later that night I walked around for 1-2 hours without my glasses on and I couldn’t see anything. Nothing at all. It was so scary. Way worse than my afternoon vision. Every light to me looked like this giant round electric-looking oval. To compare, I saw a round blurry thing on the ground. I was like “WHOA WHAT IS THAT?” when I put on my glasses, it was just a leaf.

There was a cyclist biking down the path that I didn’t see until he was maybe 10 feet away, giving me barely enough time to move to the side. I mean I was walking on the middle of this sidewalk until he appeared in my vision, he must’ve been like “what is this guy doing?” as he approached. And to me, when he appeared, he was this round grayish-black blurry blob that slowly got darker as he got closer, I noticed he was getting darker at a fast pace so I thought it must’ve been someone on a bike, I got out of the way quickly.

Anyway – today’s selfies; I didn’t really have much to choose from. I wanted to buy some new jackets, but also realized that I was losing weight. So I grabbed a jacket that my dad owned, it was a size medium so it barely fit, but it still fit. I was able to button one button, and I took some selfies while wearing it.